THE VIITH WORLD FESTIVAL OF DEMOCRATIC YOUTH (WFDY) held in Vienna July 26 to August 4 of 1959 got a lot of press all over the world. (I wrote at least 40,000 words for various audiences and publications.) It was front-page news partly because the first six festivals were held inside the Soviet bloc, and partly because the Cold War was heating up and "the West" was paranoid about communism and everything related to it.
As I began university in 1954 my Father reminisced a lot about his student days at Warsaw Polytechnic around 1930. Politics mattered a lot in country located between Bolshevism to the east and Nazism to the west. Poles worried about fifth columnists sent in by both sides.
I asked Dad how such agents could damage a democracy as old and stubborn as Poland's. (His generation was the first to be educated in Polish in 125 years because of "partitions" in the 18th Century.) He said they would work slowly, patiently, at undermining the faith of the people in lawful institutions such as police and security agents, the post office and other means of communications, educators at all levels. Their tactics would eventually make the people fearful and even suspicious of each other.
Are you, dear reader, keeping track thoughtfully of what's happening in Canada, the U.S., the world these days?
People say "the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991". All its Five Year Plans had failed, and in order to survive Russia desperately needed financial support and good will from "the West". So the ruling Politburo wrote a radically new script: Mikhail Gorbachev, a faithful Communist Party member but without a hint of murder or intrigue in his file, was fast-tracked to become General Secretary in 1985. He and his wife Raisa delighted the West with charming behaviour and quickly earned all the support Russia needed.
Only in countries which had become its satellites because of WWII were people not seduced. However, they were too small to be important in the minds of the big players on the world stage.
In 1955, Austrians had been brave enough to vote out of office the communist government the Allies imposed on them while wrapping up WWII in Europe. The departing communists made Austria's democratically-elected government promise that they would be strictly neutral. When the Kremlin decided to hold its first youth festival outside the Soviet bloc in Vienna, Austria could not refuse.
The Kremlin wasn't pleased when, in 1956, Hungary had tried to escape communist domination by outright rebellion; it was brutally repressed. In 1959, all Austrians were walking on eggs.
I write here about the festival because my work as an observer had unpleasant consequences for me on both sides of the Iron Curtain in '59, and in Canada later. It also fixed forever my belief that communism is supreme master of manipulation but our comfortable free minds in the West can't tell when we're being manipulated. Not wanting to frighten us, our governments merely react to communist tactics and hope for the best.
Radio Free Europe asked Pax Romana's Thom Kerstiens to assemble a polyglot team of young women and men to go to Vienna as WFDY observers. RFE would pay all the bills. There were 21 of us, speaking more than a dozen languages. We were instructed to connect with delegations in those language groups and find out details about them, especially where their funds came from. RFE did not believe the organizers' claims that the students themselves raised all the money they needed.
All official documents for our group were delivered quickly, except one -- my application for accreditation as an observer. It was rejected by the International Preparatory Commission of WFDY without explanation. ICMICA, the alumni parallel of Thom's office, had a permanent observer at the United Nations, an American named Ed Kirchner, who somehow got me registered and approved within a couple of weeks.
Thom's good Dutch friend Hems, in charge of our Vienna office, went on ahead and arranged for all 21 of us to have Viennese Police ID cards. The uniformed man who handed them out said that all members of the force who were known communist sympathizers had been assigned out of town for the festival's duration, so if we needed help we should not fear to show our card to the nearest person wearing a uniform exactly like his. He warned us that a lost card would not be replaced.
WFDY announced that there were 18,000 official delegates registered from 112 countries, and each would display their country's flag in some way, mostly small copies sewn on clothing. I literally bumped into Canada's Red Ensign on a member of the McGill Newman Club. Peter told me the Canadian delegation's 55 members were solidly communist -- Canada had an official Communist Party then. Its organizing committee had refused to accept him as a delegate, but a Montreal member of the committee preparing delegates for WFDY gladly sold him an insignia and no Canadian delegate objected to his hanging out with them in Vienna.
The festival's program book had 60 pages crammed with events, locations, times. Each clutching a copy of it, we set out in search of our prey. Every day ended in the office with Hems ordering us not to compare the information we had gathered, simply writing (Yes, writing in cursive!) on lined foolscap notepads everything we ourselves had done. We dated and initialed each page (common sense when so many writers and sheets of paper were involved).
Then Hems stapled each report, crossed the writer's name off a list, put reports and the list into a very big envelope which disappeared overnight, every night. We never learned where or how they were used.
In 1967, then-freelance writer Gloria Steinem wrote in The New York Times that Radio Free Europe, our generous Vienna sponsor, was a tool of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the CIA's gathering of data about the VIIth World Youth Festival was funded by a foundation set up with private money -- she didn't say whose.
So you see, I once worked for the CIA!
In Vienna latched on to three Polish men after I spotting white-above-red flags on their arm bands. I introduced myself as a Canadian studying in Switzerland. I just "happened to be in Vienna" while the festival was on, just followed my curiosity when I saw their arm bands. Could I practice my Polish with them?
They said they were medical students but looked to be in their mid- to late thirties and one even betrayed, by things he said to the others, that he made decisions about the Polish delegation. They assured me that Poland had recovered very well from WWII. They claimed to have come "just for the fun of it" during summer holidays but, alas, had forgotten to bring spending money.
We on Thom's team got cash per diems we did not have to account for. And besides, we were reimbursed for hospitality extended to delegates if we handed in receipts. I had plenty of those after buying cigarets, transit fares, and lunches for the three "medical students". I asked them questions as casually as possible, but received answers without substance. They preferred to talk about Vienna, Canada, Switzerland. They were much better at "doing espionage" than I was.
One day we planned to hear a lecture on longevity delivered by an elderly Polish professor. Simultaneous translations were available in Russian, German, French, Spanish, and English. Headsets were free at the door and every seat had five labelled switches in an armrest. The doctors didn't take headsets but I did, and flipped switches among the languages I knew.
I was not prepared for what I heard. While the professor read a text in Polish about what Poland's medical profession was doing to prolong human lives, the English, French and Spanish translators informed me that Poland's benevolent, efficient communist government was following Russia's inspiring lead by providing all the good nutrition and education and medications and technology needed to increase citizens' lifespans.
Having grown up contributing to the many different ways in which my parents regularly sent food, clothing and medicines to Mom's family (Dad lost all of his during WWII), I knew that in 1959 Poland Russia and all of its satellites lacked all necessities of life. Everything they produced was exported to earn U.S. dollars needed to prop up the failed central economy. My companions, listening in Polish only, found the lecture so uninformative that they left before it ended. I said I found it so interesting that I must stay. The lies continued to the end.
I met more than a dozen other members of Poland's delegation, real students my age or younger, but they were afraid to talk about anything except Vienna and the weather. They didn't dare express interest in Canada or Switzerland. I bought cigarets and food for them, too.
Ed Kirchner of ICMICA had come from New York determined to persuade the festival's organizing committee to insert some sort of religious content into the program. A couple of days before the end, a "Believers' Day" was planned in a large movie theatre, with three keynote speakers presenting the core beliefs of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Those three men were far from being the brightest lights in town.
The French speaker about Christianity used the word "element" instead of Christ or God. The three were suspicious of each other, even hostile. When questions from the floor were invited after all had spoken, they interrupted each other to argue, triggering arguments in the very large audience. Shouting matches began.
Festival security guards hurried down the aisles. City police arrived because fights were breaking out outside the hall. I ran to one of them and showed my ID. He pointed in a direction, saying it was safe to run that way.
I fled in tears because religions had been manipulated. Three clowns had been chosen to speak for them. The ever-cheerful Ed shrugged off the disaster as "a loss for our side". He was preoccupied with very bad press reports about the official U.S. delegation. Its 600 members included communists and anti-communists, and their nasty infighting was being reported all over the world.
Americans in both camps threw an incredible amount of money at that WFDY. Those who communicated good news about capitalism and democracy used every lure available, from first-run Hollywood films to an Ella Fitzgerald concert.
Unfortunately, one very significant detail escaped them. Since the first WFDY in 1947 (and for a few years after Vienna), festival slogans contained the core term "peace and friendship", translated into all host languages. In German-speaking Austria in '59 those key words were Frieden und Freundschaft. But the term had been mis-translated in the U.S. In printed matter prepared there, "Frieden" became "freedom" so the festival's English slogan became "Freedom and friendship".
The German for "freedom" is Freiheit".
The error appeared everywhere, in all languages because the U.S. originals were copied elsewhere. Our team suspected that that error in translation was the result of sabotage. Just a few persons in exactly the right place(s) in the U.S. could do easily it. My Dad had made that clear to me years before.
During the festival, communism abused freedoms in Vienna as it pleased. Delegations from countries from which large numbers of people fled, or had tried to flee, to the West during the Cold War, had armed guards with them at all times. Delegations from Russia's most volatile satellites were housed on ships moored on the Danube.
In Canada, Phyl Griffiths at the Tely had kept track of me and asked for a detailed report about the Festival, for her eyes only, not for publication. After I returned to Carleton in October, the student newspaper asked for as many words as I could produce, and published all 13,000 of them. I closed that piece with a Polish delegate's remark that the West should hold a festival in New York City or Ottawa. Mr. Needham's grapevine somehow picked that up and he asked me for an article proposing a festival here, which he ran on the editorial page.
The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, February 3, 1960 p. 6
"A World Youth Festival for Canada
"By WandaS
"Why doesn't Canada hold a world youth festival? A considerable number of students learn about our country at first hand through the Colombo Plan, UNESCO grants and the like, but right now Canada is still far from enjoying the popularity and respect it deserves in world opinion.
"A gathering here of students and young people from other countries would be of immeasurable benefit to all concerned; and it would minimize the frequency of such errors about Canada as the postal address "Canada, U.S.A."
"The Kremlin has organized seven World Youth Festivals through its front groups, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. The most recent one, held in Vienna last summer, involved about 14,000 delegates, and was the first to be held outside the Iron Curtain. Events at it proved the Communist motives behind the festival tradition.
"Now, after the unsuccessful anti-Western Vienna Festival, is the ideal time for the free world to make itself known to students and young people. Our country stands to benefit a great deal from a gathering of them here, with respect to its own international-mindedness, world opinion and trade.
"What is more, the holding of a festival in the free world would mean beating the Communists at their own game, for it would certainly fulfill any claims to 'help young people toward international understanding', and to promote free discussion among them. The Vienna Festival's organizers, who did make such claims, sowed international discord through anti-Western propaganda and actually restricted the freedom of many delegates physically. They made a mockery of their own most progressive and 'freedom-loving people' slogans.
"In view of the Kremlin's present policy of peaceful coexistence, the withholding of delegates to a Canadian Festival from behind the Iron Curtain would embarrass Communist leaders. It might occur, on the grounds that a Canadian Festival would be 'warmongering' or 'capitalistically corrupting' or some such gem.
"However, the youth behind the Iron Curtain is not nearly as important in this issue as is that of South America, Africa and Asia. The Communists made this quite clear in Vienna, when they directed their propaganda most intensely at delegates from those areas, and in that order. Therefore, it is infinitely important that we introduce ourselves to the students of still-free nations.
"The Kremlin's front groups selected delegates to Vienna. Canada, in organizing a festival, could ask a truly international body such as UNESCO to help her. The event should take place in midsummer, when most university students are free. The Vienna Festival lasted 10 days — that length of time, or as much as two weeks, would be desirable.
"Board and lodgings in Vienna were the cheapest available, some downright disgusting. (Forty Latin Americans moved from festival quarters to hotels at their own expense.) Any Canadian accommodations, from hotels to boarding houses, could not fail to please delegates.
"During the 10 days of the Vienna Festival, some 700 events took place, ranging from dances and sporting contests, through lectures and fashion shows, to performances by professional troupes like the Peking Opera. The entertainment was excellent, but only performers from behind the Iron Curtain were to be seen. The 'intellectual' fare was so full of what one rebellious delegate termed the 'Moscow propaganda line' that it defeated its own purpose.
"Canada could certainly enlist the co-operation of the National Ballet, the Comedie Francaise, the London Philharmonic, scientists, industrialists and athletes throughout the world, and take advantage of the freedom to travel by performers from behind the Iron Curtain.
"Before and after the Vienna Festival, delegates had free tours through 'People's Democracies'. Non-Communist offers to take delegates through Western European countries were refused by the 'chaperones' of delegations. Participants in a Canadian Festival could enjoy limitless variety in many fields, simply by touring this one country: the Seaway, the University of Toronto, the Niagara fruit belt, the Banff School of Fine Arts; how impressed they would be by visits to private homes, a paper mill, a prairie farm, a supermarket!
"The Vienna Festival probably cost about $100 million. An explanation of financial resources demanded considerable ingenuity on the organizers' part, for the Communist system has no philanthropists. If one of our cities can spend half the cost of such a gathering on renovating its sewage system, surely there would be no difficulty in collecting funds to introduce Canada to the youth of the world.
"Instead of being on the defensive against Communism and using verbal platitudes as weapons, Canada could realize some potent anti-Communist propaganda of its own and prove the worth of the capitalist system, merely by extending a generous invitation.
"The next Communist World Youth Festival will take place in 1961. The time to begin planning a Canadian Festival, therefore, is now — immediately! We claim to be a free and wise society. We have a great deal to show the world, a lot to share with it. A Canadian Youth Festival would benefit us greatly, and probably cost less than we spend annually on pink detergents, liquor, cosmetics and sliced bread.
CHAPTER 13 of GLIMPSES -- 30